The mediating role of social and entrepreneurial self-efficacies in the relationship between entrepreneurial social identities and intention

Purpose Despite the fact that entrepreneurs often tackle environmental, political and social causes, in the entrepreneurial literature the focus is most often on entrepreneurial self-efficacy. However, the role of other task-specific skillsets in entrepreneurial intention and the relationship of these skillsets with entrepreneurs’ social identity have been largely ignored in the literature. As entrepreneurial success requires strong interpersonal skills and the dominant aim of some entrepreneurs is to tackle social causes, we theoretically and empirically investigate for whom and why social self-efficacy can be an important predictor of entrepreneurial intention. Design/methodology/approach We examined the mediating role of entrepreneurial and social self-efficacies in the relationship between entrepreneurial social identity and entrepreneurial intention. The empirical analyses of this study are based on a sample of 1,006 Hungarian individuals. An online questionnaire was used to gather the data. PROCESS macro v4.1 (bootstrap samples 5,000) for Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) was applied with models 4 and 6 to test whether social and entrepreneurial self-efficacies mediate the relationship between entrepreneurial social identity and entrepreneurial intention. Findings The findings indicate that the effect of Darwinian social identity on entrepreneurial intention is fully mediated by entrepreneurial self-efficacy. Both social and entrepreneurial self-efficacies fully explain the association between Communitarian social identity and entrepreneurial intention. However, future Missionaries anticipate the need for other task-specific skills beyond social and entrepreneurial skills to become an entrepreneur and achieve entrepreneurial success. Originality/value The study extends the entrepreneurship literature by showing that individuals’ entrepreneurial social identity and task-specific self-efficacies are intertwined in influencing the intention to create different values through entrepreneurial activities. The results also indicate that following the proliferation of the roles entrepreneurs undertake, next to entrepreneurial self-efficacy, other task-specific self-efficacies should be considered when studying the antecedents of entrepreneurial intention.